Canadian Hockey Reigns Supreme

Four years ago, the gold-medal game was a late-afternoon business, as I recall; this time around, I was up early making coffee and oatmeal—with Quebec maple syrup, of course—for the big one between Team Canada and the Swedes. As I did so, I wondered when the unique, backward formulation of “Team” first, country second began in hockey—all this Team Latvia, Team Canada stuff. (No one talks about Team Brazil or Team Scotland.) It seems—and I may well be wrong—that this neologism first occurred with the 1972 Summit Series team, and was a reflection of the hopeful Canadian bilingualism of the Trudeau era: the French “Equipe Canada” was easily balanced, in graphics and team logos and the like, by a symmetrical Anglo “Team Canada.” It led me to reflect, mid-spoonful, on one of the odder and more overlooked aspects of this Canadian team—the unfortunate truth that only three players on the ice—Patrice Bergeron, Martin St. Louis, and Marc-Edouard Vlasic—were from Quebec (a fourth, Roberto Luongo, remained on the bench for the game), compared with so many more in years past (eight Quebecois in ’76 alone!). The decline of Quebec hockey, goalies aside, is a genuine mystery, one that the province has been trying to remedy: a 2011 summit to address the crisis ended with a determination to bring coaching standards up to grade, particularly by emphasizing specific skills for specific positions, with mixed but promising results so far.

(The prelims are marred only by the absence of the company of my good friend and fellow-Canadian Bruce McCall, the peerless New Yorker cover visionary, who saw his shoulder succumb to the ice of an Upper West Side street earlier this week.)

With the TV on, and all the superstitious totems in place—I should add that all previous doubt, loudly expressed, about Team Canada’s readiness was one of them—the game began. (It’s reassuring, totem-wise, to see Jeremy Roenick on hand to comment, since he has obviously been chosen by NBC for his eerie, apropos resemblance to that great Canadian, Dudley Do-Right.) Sweden briefly looked, as they say in soccer broadcasts, more organized—more cohesive and threatening. (The language of soccer is all about unrealized potential, what might yet take place. The usual language of hockey analysis is all about retrospective action: What just happened?) But within ten minutes we were in Seahawks-Broncos Super Bowl territory: it was obvious that Canada would win; the only remaining questions were by how many goals, and scored by whom. The final: 3-0, Canada with the game and the gold. Seahawks-style dominance, minus the show-off stuff.

Sweden was badly undermanned, of course, but it’s hard to think that Henrik Zetterberg and the team’s other injured stars would have made much difference. It should be said, though, that the first two Canadian goals—a perfect tip by Jonathan Toews, and an amazing breakaway backhand by Sidney Crosby (his surprising physical strength, muscling around defensemen, is the single aspect of his game that is stronger than Gretzky’s)—had to be perfect to get by the King, Henrik Lundqvist, at all. Lest anyone think that the Swedes didn’t show up, rather than show up bravely and then get beaten, one should also reference the wise point, often made by the announcers, that such normally cautious players as Daniel Sedin and Daniel Alfredsson were cheerfully throwing their bodies in front of pucks—offering, one felt, a silent editorial on the significance of the normal N.H.L. schedule. (To be fair, of course, if Sedin and Alfredsson were to play a Tuesday-night game in Glendale before two thousand or so confused Arizonians, in the same spirit that they played on Sunday, they would not survive to see the Stanley Cup playoffs.)

The only thing to upset the early-morning serenity was the single most obnoxious television ad ever made: the one for Cadillac, in which the life of the tiniest one per cent of the one per cent is represented as an American birthright. It’s the one with the appalling guy who high-fives his kids (without looking at them) and then ends with an anti-French flourish: “You work hard; you create your own luck. And all that stuff? That’s the upside of only taking two weeks off in August, n’est-ce pas?” The French is proudly mispronounced, but if any Francophone ad were as aggressively anti-American as this one is against the French, you’d be reading about it for weeks in the Wall Street Journal. That the French summer vacation is not a rule forced on the rich entrepreneur—who can scheme on his yacht all August if he likes—but a protection for the poor worker he employs, is not something that occurs to the Cadillac mind. (If you want to understand why the rest of the world likes to watch Americans lose, this ad explains it all.)

As the game settled into the inevitable, it left time for contemplation, and one clear thought emerged: this game, for its occasional doldrums, did mark a real transition in the history of hockey. The great Canadian victories in international hockey during the seventies and even the eighties, memorable though they were—more memorable, in most ways, than this one—were skin-of-your-teeth affairs, overtime victories interspersed with thudding and often one-sided defeats at the hands of the Soviets and Czechs. Now, Canadian hockey, as my friend Nick Paumgarten suggests—his knowledge is as wide as the rinks he favors are small—is the clearly superior game. This is a function of the Europeanization of North American hockey—those mobile defensemen, the much more creative game strategy—and, perhaps, of the Americanization of European hockey. (The old Russian teams, playing with eleven months of hockey drills under their belts, will never appear again.) The great change has been in goaltending and defense. Watch videos of teams from the seventies: while the Canadian forwards look as skilled as ever, the goalkeeping looks desperate and lunging, and the Canadian defensemen, of the Bill White or Don Awrey kind, are the real dinosaurs of those teams, upright and stiff as, well, pylons. (Heresy though it may be to say, even Bobby Orr made more defensive errors in a game than Drew Doughty has in a lifetime.)

Gary Bettman, it seems, is trying to keep Canada out of the next Olympics, insisting that the Winter Games interfere with the normal flow of N.H.L. play (!) and that, anyway, “our game has more offensive intensity, particularly in play around the net” (i.e., more guys sitting on top of helpless goaltenders). I hope that young Justin Trudeau, the new leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, does what his dad, the aforementioned visionary Pierre, would have done, and says that the decision to represent the country in the Olympics should be left to the Canadian players and the Canadian people, and that such a decision will never be seconded to two more weeks of profit-seeking by Boston and Philadelphia billionaires. If N.H.L. execs need an activity to keep them busy while the Canadians win another gold medal, they can spend the Olympics driving their Cadillacs around the streets of their gated communities, sneering at the rest of the world. Meanwhile, their erstwhile employees can bring another gold medal back to their countrymen, for the pure pleasure of the thing.

Photograph by Martin Rose/Getty

Adam Gopnik, a staff writer, has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1986.